Europe only patents things you can touch

Four out of five clients come to us asking for help in using patents to protect their software. This is possible in the United States or China. But not in Europe and countries with its legal culture, where patents can only be registered for technical solutions.

At the same time, the invention must be described in the application in sufficient detail that an expert in the field could produce it. Or it is necessary to reveal one’s idea. This will discourage quite a few people, because patent applications are public. But if you give up too soon, you risk someone just disassembling and copying your product.

For software in Europe, the only possible way is to look for technical solutions with a software component and patent them as a whole. Otherwise programmers have to rely on copyright law.

Patents, just like trademarks, only apply to the territory in which they were registered. Not even the largest companies register them worldwide – this is several orders of magnitude more expensive than for brand names (trademarks).

For example, in the USA in our experience, more complex patents can cost up to 1.5 million CZK. And there are countries where their legal situation makes something similar largely impossible to imagine.

The Czech Industrial Property Office has traditionally had a good reputation in studies whether or not a given technical solution was patented or published by someone else worldwide. That’s why we always recommend Czech clients start with a Czech patent application and then expand to further jurisdictions.